Help! Locked out of my own win2k system...

[Remnant2]

My brother just brought his laptop home from college for the summer. We wanted to hook it up to a local network I have here. It was already setup to use DHCP to automatically get an IP address, so I made a single change:

In Control Panel->System->Network ID->Properties, I changed it from being a member of the campus domain, to my LAN workgroup. It said everything was ok, and to reboot to take effect. Did so..

but now it won't recognize the username & password! It's impossible to login to the system to change the setting back.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm at wits' end.

 

[bsobel]

You can try last known good at bootup. Also, did your brother install 2k or did the school? During install you would have set a default administrator password. Try logging in as just administrator (no domain) and either a blank password or whatever your brother might have used.

Bill

 

[tboneuls]

Try restoring it to the previously known configuration, but after that the only thing you can try is logging in under admin.

 

[Remnant2]

Unfortunately the computer was setup by the school, and as far as I know (I didn't check out the user profiles) they either removed the Administrator account or set the password to something they don't give out. AFAIK there's only a single user account on his machine, and that is the one that doesn't work now (complains that the password and/or domain is wrong).

I tried starting it up in the last-known-good config, but it blue-screened and rebooted the laptop! (?)


Thanks for the ideas anyways! Any more?

 

[Wooster]

Seems like your brother have a login account in the school domain. Is your brother's login account under local adminstrator group? Does your brother know what is his computer name? If you don't know, try guest login and get into the system. Guest account will not let you change anything but enough to go around to found out the setting. Also does it have Novell network login on it? Let us know.

Good luck.